Review: According to the demi-legends passed around in small musical communities, this album is earlier Krieg work as originally intended by the artist, which is borne out by this tracklist including familiar favorites from the last handful of Krieg releases. As the most convincing musical document to recently emerge from this band, it shows a mastery of atmosphere that cries out to be pushed further, as it seems often Krieg creates an immersion of mood only to let it fall, like an unused sword in a hopeless conflict, where there is more to be explored and enjoyed in the fertile imagination brought on by a world with enough conflicting impetus to give space for adventure. With its citation of varied classical and ambient musics as interludes, this band does indeed create a world, one filled by its angrier moments of surging guitar riffs.

Like a hybrid of Ildjarn with doom metal sped up, its riffs are mostly rhythm, often only two notes, and like Darkthrone create a mood by sustaining difference in a way that illustrates boundaries that can later be infused with twists of fate. Often, perfectly reasonable progressions explode into a turn or deviation which in the hands of a lesser band would be mirror-image irony, but here represent new spaces for a journey in the part of the soul that, not beholden to language, can express the ambiguous with a sense of expectation.

This spirit emerges as much through the burrowing wall of distorted guitar as the unearthly screams and trancelike ambience, but is ultimately underdeveloped for where this band could go. Percussion admirably finds a way to both complement guitar riffs and lead on its own with a steady heartbeat of recursive snare and snickering cymbals, impressive predominantly in that it does not distract. This is the best from Krieg of recent vintage, and if this band continues, it would do well to push further in this direction.